Drawing

The second handmade receipt book is full of drawings about transport. Travelling is always interesting when you use modes of transport that you wouldn’t do at home. For example the people who live around the backwaters of Kerala rely on boats to get around. Most of the area is made up of little islands carved up by an abundance of lagoons and lakes. These areas of water are slightly salty as the water originates from and sits just inland from the Arabian Sea.

In the big cities push bikes, motorbikes and tuk tuks are the choice of the majority able to weave in and out of the busy traffic and get you where you need to go quickly. I have seen all of these three converted into small vans to transport goods around in an economical fashion, you can’t really believe how much someone can stack up in one of these its a proper art form!

And finally come the buses and trucks the biggest things on the road which take longer to get places due to their size and not having the ability to squeeze through tiny gaps quite like a bike or tuk tuk although most will have a good shot at it!

The previous post showed you some of the papers I collected in India. I collected so much stuff that I needed an extra bag to come home with! One of my plans was to hand make some little books that I could use for collections of drawings. They would then live in the pockets I made in my sketchbook.

This one was all about the animals I had seen up to that point on my journey. It is made from a collection of receipts stitched together and covered with part of a local newspaper using a particularly lovely bit of text. This was my first one and worked really well so it started a bit of a craze of collecting receipts and stitching books. More to follow…

A tiny book finally complete with a new box for a home. If you follow me on Instagram you may remember the saga of ‘The dog who ate my homework’ and the little book that came out of that incident. Well I have finally got back to the original Berlin book and finished it and a kind friend donated me this box for its new forever home. It just needed a bit of customising and here we are!